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Isabella Banks ’15 received a Fulbright Study/Research grant in International Crimes, Conflict, and Criminology for 2018–19.

Isabella Banks ’15 was awarded a 2018–19 Fulbright Study/Research Grant for the master’s program in International Crimes, Conflict, and Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Combining perspectives and methodologies from the fields of criminology, law, psychology, sociology, and political science, the program also draws on resources available through its location near The Hague—home to the UN’s International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

“I hope to focus my research on transitional justice, which applies restorative principles to systematic, conflict-related human rights violations,” says Banks, who majored in the College of Social Studies with a certificate in international relations while at Wesleyan. Her honors thesis, “The Jury Is Out: Negotiated Agreements in the German Inquisitorial System,” is an exploration of the United States’ adversarial system of justice in comparison with the German inquisitorial system. A 2015 article in the Connection noted that Banks said her interest in exploring alternatives to the U.S. system of criminal justice was initiated by what she observed as its “growing dysfunction” as well as the increasing measure of disapproval it garnered.

After graduating, Banks studied abroad on a one-year Watson Fellowship, pursuing research in restorative justice in countries such as New Zealand, Australia, England, and South Africa. For her project, “Making Crime Personal: Restorative Alternatives to Criminal Justice,” she interviewed individuals involved in a range of restorative justice processes and acted as a participant observer in schools, prisons, and community organizations working to implement restorative practices.

She is currently affiliated with the Center for Court Innovation in New York City, whose founding director was John Feinblatt ’73 and current director is Greg Berman ’89. Banks serves as a planner for the Research-Practice Strategies team led by Director of Policy and Research Julian Adler ’02.

“My Watson year opened my eyes to the importance of human relationships in justice processes and fostered a fascination with conflict transformation that I am sure will drive my learning for years to come,” said Banks.

Brendan McGlone ’18 received a fellowship from the Paideia Institute to study and teach in Rome.

Brendan McGlone ’18, who’s on track to graduate in May with a triple major in classics, medieval studies and the College of Letters, will continue his post-Wesleyan education in Rome as a Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study Fellow.

The Paideia Institute is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to promoting the study and appreciation of the classical humanities, with a focus on Latin and Ancient Greek languages and literature.

Paideia Fellows are selected on the basis of academic merit, personality, and potential as a future teacher of classics. Fellows teach American high school students Latin, and lead them on classics-themed tours around Rome and the Mediterranean. In addition, fellows work on independent research published in the blog “Loci in Locis.”

For his senior thesis at Wesleyan, McGlone is decoding and translating a late medieval manuscript collection of sermons housed in Wesleyan’s Special Collections & Archives.

“I hope to be able to continue with the type of research I am doing for my thesis, looking at the manuscript collections held in the Vatican Libraries or elsewhere in the city,” he said. “I also hope to use the year to figure out my future plans—perhaps grad school, perhaps teaching, perhaps something totally different.”

McGlone’s love for Latin originated in high school and was fostered at Wesleyan. He’s also a practicing Catholic and found studying Latin has broadened and deepened his religious understanding and experiences.

“I took a few classes with Professors Andy Szegedy-Maszak and Michael Roberts, two of the best teachers and scholars I’ve encountered at Wes,” McGlone said.

Anna Savage ’18 will complete a Princeton in Latin America (PiLA) fellowship in the Dominican Republic.

Anna Savage ’18 has received a Princeton in Latin America (PiLA) fellowship to work with the Mariposa Foundation in Cabarete, a town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. She will begin the fellowship after graduation in May.

Savage follows a proud tradition of Wesleyan students participating in PiLA fellowships. The Mariposa Foundation works to end generational poverty by providing a space in which girls and young women can receive high-quality academic and artistic instruction, as well as comprehensive sexual health education. The Mariposa center serves about 150 girls and places particular emphasis on musical and artistic expression, as well as on the cultivation of leadership skills.

Savage will teach music, yoga, and English at the center, where she will develop her own curriculum and instruct girls aged seven to 18 in daily classes.

Casey Herrick ’16, a Houston-based artist and designer, was named a Henry Luce Scholar for 2018 and will be moving to Beijing this summer. (Photo courtesy Casey Herrick)

Casey Herrick ’16, a Houston-based artist and designer, was named a Henry Luce Scholar for 2018. One of 18 scholars selected from among 162 candidates, Herrick will begin with an orientation in New York starting in June, before the cohort embarks for Asia. The Henry Luce Foundation was established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., to honor his parents, who were missionary educators in China. The Luce Scholars Program was launched in 1974 to “enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society.”

Upon his graduation from Wesleyan, Herrick, who majored in studio art and psychology, returned to his hometown of Houston to work as lead 3D-designer, as well as photographer, graphic designer, and video editor at ttweak LLC, an artist-based strategic communications firm. Herrick notes that his work at ttweak has provided the opportunity to work with some of the area’s most prominent institutions, including the Houston Endowment, the Texas Medical Center, the Lawndale Art Center, and the Houston Parks Board. His collaborations focus on helping the organizations communicate dynamically, with maximum effectiveness.

Transitioning out of the design field, Herrick now works as a full-time painter. At Wesleyan, he was deeply involved with Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts, serving as a photography lab assistant, a woodshop monitor, and a studio arts teaching assistant. In 2015, he received the university’s Zawisa Grant to photograph the American South, with a focus on regional identity in Louisiana and East Texas. His thesis, Safe Conduct, focused on expectations and traditions associated with gender and the role of society in boys’ coming-of-age. Featuring a 10-by-6 foot canvas, in addition to five other paintings, his thesis work earned him Highest Honors—and New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum purchased one of the paintings, “The Herndon Climb,” for its permanent collection. He was also awarded the Studio Art Program Award for departmental achievement.

Says Herrick, “I’m thrilled to be given this opportunity. This summer, I’ll be moving to Beijing to work at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts and with the city’s art community at large. Right now, I’m frantically trying to learn Mandarin. I know the words for coffee, sandwich, and horse—so I’d say I still have some work to do!”

For more information on fellowships and scholarships, please contact Kate Smith, associate director of fellowships, internships and exchanges, at Wesleyan’s Fries Center for Global Studies. Smith says: “Applicants are interested in fellowships and scholarships for a number of reasons; they offer opportunities to continue academic or language study and to pursue research or explore professional interests. The more students engage with their coursework and harness opportunities available at Wesleyan, the more purposeful they can be when considering these programs.”

Anthony Price ’20, pictured here by the Washington Monument in Washington D.C., is half-way through a five-month internship on Capitol Hill. “The internship will be a huge asset to the rest of my studies at Wesleyan and it’s a huge stepping stone to help me pursue a career in public service, or perhaps on the Hill,” he said.

As a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation intern, Anthony Price ’20 is spending the spring semester working on Capitol Hill, where he is learning about governing institutions and the inner workings of the U.S. Congress.

The CBCF’s internship programs “prepare college students and young professionals to become principled leaders, skilled policy analysts and informed advocates by exposing them to the processes that develop national policies and implement them—from Capitol Hill to federal field offices. Program participants receive housing, a stipend, office placements, and opportunities to meet and interact with professional legislators and leaders working in all branches of government.”

“Thus far, I’ve enhanced my leadership, adaptability and writing skills immensely,” Price said. “At the end of the program, I know I will have a better understanding of our American legislative process and the work that’s being done day-to-day within the branches of Congress.”

As an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow, Marguerite Nguyen will spend the 2018-19 academic year working on her second book project in New Orleans, La.

Nguyen, assistant professor of English, received the ACLS Fellowship in February.

ACLS, a private, nonprofit federation of 75 national scholarly organizations, aims to advance scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences by awarding fellowships and strengthening relations among learned societies. Since 1957, more than 40 Wesleyan faculty have received an ACLS fellowship.

Nguyen will focus her fellowship on Vietnamese American accounts of forced displacement in New Orleans to outline a broader paradigm for interpreting refugee culture. Her project is tentatively titled “Asian American New Orleans: Rethinking Refugee Aesthetics, Agency and Archives.”

“When we see refugees portrayed in the media, they are typically depicted in terms of crisis and emergency,” Nguyen said. “But refugee narratives often describe migration differently—as temporally elongated experiences that cannot be understood in terms of finite periods of migration, asylum and resettlement.”

With two fellowships, Mika Reyes ’17 joined the tech-savvy world of Silicon Valley and encourages other Wesleyan humanities majors to follow her path.

Mika Reyes ’17 has stayed busy since graduating just last May, as both a summer fellow with the Horizons School of Technology and a year-long Product fellow with the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) fellowship program. These prestigious programs have helped Reyes jump-start a career in tech.

The Horizons Fellowship immerses university students looking to become leaders in technology in a rigorous summer program that teaches them how to build web and mobile applications and connects them with mentors in the field: startup founders, technology executives, and engineering leaders. Horizons requires no prior programming knowledge and chooses a few members of every cohort for the Horizons Fellowship, which covers the cost of tuition and housing in San Francisco.

Seven Wesleyans are finalists in the Fulbright U.S. Student Program this year. The Fulbright Student Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The program operates in 160 countries worldwide.

In total, 38 former and current Wesleyan students applied, and 12 were semi-finalists. Of those, two were selected as alternates, and eight were finalists. Seven of them accepted Fulbrights.

The program provides grants for individually designed study/research projects or for English Teaching Assistant Programs.

Johnson, who will be on scholarly leave for the 2017-2018 academic year, will work on a manuscript for his book project, which examines the intersections between education and settler-colonialism in the United States. He also plans to conduct interviews in Alaska Native villages and the Navajo and Tohono O’odham nations to document the historic relationships forged between Native students and African American educators who taught in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools between 1950 and 1980.

“Although I will be living and writing in New Haven for the year, I hope to remain active in on campus events at Wesleyan,” he said.

Johnson specializes in the intertwined histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous people in North America, with emphases on U.S. settler colonialism, education and counter-hegemonic social movements. His teaching areas include courses in the history of emancipatory education and U.S. empire, early African American history, American Indian history and popular music.

Johnson has already received support from numerous institutions, including the Ford Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and a predoctoral teaching fellowship at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His essays and editorials have appeared in American Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review and The Navajo Times. In 2015, he received recognition from the Western History Association for the year’s best essay on Native American history.

Emma Porrazzo ’19 is one of 550 American students in the U.S. to receive a Critical Language Scholarship. This summer, she will spend more than eight weeks abroad learning Chinese language and culture in Suzhou, China. (Photo by Olivia Drake)

According to the CLS program website, the scholarship is part of a U.S. government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages. “CLS scholars gain critical language and cultural skills that enable them to contribute to U.S. economic competitiveness and national security.” Porrazzo is among approximately 550 American students at U.S. colleges and universities to receive the scholarship this year.

“Critical languages” are defined as those that are less commonly taught in U.S. schools but are essential for America’s engagement with the world. Students spend eight to 10 weeks overseas, where they receive intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language development.

This spring, Wesleyan has awarded six Wesleyan students with a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. The fellowship is the centerpiece of the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s initiatives to increase the presence of traditionally underrepresented groups in the faculty ranks of institutions of higher learning in the U.S.

Fellows participate in the program during the last two years of undergraduate study and receive a monthly stipend to offset work study requirements, modest research funds, and additional summer research funding as part of the fellowship. Upon successful completion of graduate study, Mellon Mays Fellows also receive up to $10,000 to assist in repayment of student loans.

Michaela Fisher’s Watson Fellowship will take her to Spain, Argentina, New Zealand, Germany and Canada. Fisher is interested in understanding “the many ways in which co-ops can flourish or fail.” (Photo by Olivia Drake)

As the recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Michaela Fisher ’17 will spend a year studying cooperatives in five countries. Her project, titled “Cooperative Worlds: Exploring the Global Cooperative Economy,” will take her to Spain, Argentina, New Zealand, Germany and Canada.

Watson Fellows are all seniors nominated by 40 partner colleges. According to the website, “Fellows conceive original projects, execute them outside of the United States for one year and embrace the ensuing journey. They decide where to go, who to meet, and when to change course.” Fellows receive a $30,000, 12-month travel stipend and health insurance while abroad.

The Thomas J. Watson Foundation was created in 1961 by Jeanette K. Watson in the name of her husband, Thomas J. Watson Sr., best known for building IBM. Through one-of-a-kind programs, the Foundation provides fellows with cultural, professional and personal opportunities that challenge them to expand their vision, test and develop their potential, and build the confidence and perspective to do so for others.

We are SO excited to celebrate the graduating class of 2019 tomorrow! 🎓 Unable to join in person? Here's where you can watch the ceremony LIVE on Sunday, May 26 at 11 a.m. EST #Wes2019:
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Lots of great WESeminars today! Here's your chance to revisit the classroom this weekend and experience firsthand the academic excellence that is the essence of Wesleyan. Check out the schedule #WesReunion#Wes2019: fal.cn/ARoc